I plowed my way through the final dungeon to the final boss who behaved differently than every other boss fight in the game in ways that made my initial plan bad. Unfortunately it took me a few rounds to figure out what was going on and by that point it was almost too late. It turns out the final boss has two tentacles which take actions as well and aren't taunted along with the main boss by my viking. They still follow the rule of one spell per monster no matter how many actions they take in a round but there are 3 monsters so they can cast three spells. One of the tentacles always seemed to cast a spell which did about 80% of my black belt's maximum health. The main boss sometimes cast a spell which did about that much as well. Eventually I realized the tentacles existed, just let my black belt stay dead, put a shield on the ninja, and just threw shuriken at the tentacle casting lightning. I managed to kill it but then timing worked out poorly and the boss got two turns in a row, used the massive AE both times, and managed to kill everyone.
I did learn that the protect spell is actually also the shell spell in this game. (It wore off of my viking in the middle of the fight and he started taking a much larger amount of damage from the AE spells.)
Ok, 3.5 hours gone... What to do? I decided I probably wanted to get my job level high enough on the viking to get into the 90% chance to land taunt bracket. So I spent a couple hours yesterday watching a Criminal Minds marathon on A&E while grinding on random idiots that couldn't possibly kill me. Then I started killing them off before my viking even got to take an action so I just decided to put him in tanking mode and taunt all the time. (Vikings are very slow so they go last but taunt is rigged to always go first so it isn't useless.)
I also knew in advance that my ninja was going to take a beating if he wasn't wearing a shield so I put the shield on and put him in the back row from the start. I also used protect casting consumables in the first round to try to cut down on the number of insta-gibs on the black belt. (Probably I should have changed to a different job entirely but I thought I could win as is.)
I get into the fight and it turns out the boss only starts casting his AE spell after he's taken a bunch of damage. Since I started the fight this time by killing the tentacles that never happened so they never actually cast enough spells in a single round to kill anyone. I had one scary turn where taunt missed and the boss almost killed my ninja (good thing he was in the back row) but other than that the fight was actually really easy.
There were a bunch of cutscenes after the final boss where we learned what all of the NPCs we met along the way were going to do with their lives. Nothing was learned about the four actual player characters. As far as I know they're just brutally powerful killing machines with no lives to return to. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them took over the world at some point. (Probably Bung...)
In all, a really great game. Part of me actually wants to start over again with a different party setup (all casters the whole way) instead of moving on to a different game. Also there's apparently a challenge dungeon that gets unlocked via the Mognet thing I didn't do so I kinda want to do that too. This is going to move to the top of the list of games played so far but I wonder how much of that is because of the changes made on the DS compared to the original game...
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy III. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy III. Show all posts
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Friday, October 28, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Final Dungeon
Last night I made it into what I believe to be the final dungeon in Final Fantasy III and I have some issues with the design. The first issue is one with the game in general which is that you simply cannot save anywhere except on the world map. This is annoying in the sense that you can clear out a dungeon, find all the treasure, and then lose to the boss of the dungeon and have all the previous progress thrown out. I want the bosses in dungeons to be a challenge but it's frustrating to find one that actually is a challenge if you lose an hour of progress because of it. I've dealt with this so far by leaving a couple dungeons after clearing out most of the loot and then saving so I'm risking less when I fight the boss. (This has also meant doing more fights than I normally would which makes the challenging fights less of a challenge. I don't know if this is a good thing or not.)
The second problem, which links into the first one, is I can't leave the final dungeon. There is no exit and the teleport spell is greyed out. This makes sense from a story point of view as my party has been transported to another world where I'm supposed to team up with the warriors of dark to vanquish the big bad. But from a gameplay point of view it really sucks. From the last point I can save until when I expect to meet the final boss will be around 3 hours of gameplay, a dozen or so treasure chests, and at least 9 mid-boss fights. The random encounters have a chance to get a sneak attack and possibly wipe me out and the bosses can certainly get lucky and kill me as well. (Action order in the round is based on agility and job level but has a random component as well. It is very possible the boss will get 2 turns between actions from my healer which could be very bad news.)
I'm not opposed to the final dungeon being long, or to it being hard. I want the final boss to be tricky and to require building a good party for the task or leveling a bunch. I feel like I should die while I get the hang of the fight. But when I'm probably going to lose 5+ hours in the process? That's not cool. (If I die then I lose the 3 hours it will take me to get back to that point and probably I'll want to grind out a couple hours worth of levels before I do if I died for power level reasons.)
The last time I played Final Fantasy III, after buying it for the DS a few years ago, I actually didn't finish the game. I died in the final dungeon, lost a couple hours, and got fed up. I don't remember if I just took a break to play something else or what but I never did go back and finish up. Andrew bought the game on DS at the same time I did and I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to him. It's just so demoralizing to lose a couple hours worth of progress because the game simply doesn't let you prevent it from happening in any way except by being perfect and lucky in every single fight in the final dungeon.
I don't have a clue what the final boss is going to be like but I think my current party set-up is going to be pretty good for winning no matter what it ends up being. Viking, black belt, devout, ninja is working out pretty well. The black belt and ninja take way too much damage from melee hits and from spells but I've leveled enough that it should take three hits to kill them. The devout casts a full heal spell on the whole party every round and the viking taunts 80% of the time. Bosses so far have only ever cast one spell per round so the only way I can lose someone is if the taunt fails AND the timing works out poorly such that the boss goes twice between devout rounds AND he actually casts two spells AND he targets one of the squishies with his attack. Then I have to spend an arise spell on them which prevents the party from getting healed so things do get dangerous but I can probably survive. I'll probably get to find out tonight if I'm going to have won the game or if I'm going to be very bitter...
The second problem, which links into the first one, is I can't leave the final dungeon. There is no exit and the teleport spell is greyed out. This makes sense from a story point of view as my party has been transported to another world where I'm supposed to team up with the warriors of dark to vanquish the big bad. But from a gameplay point of view it really sucks. From the last point I can save until when I expect to meet the final boss will be around 3 hours of gameplay, a dozen or so treasure chests, and at least 9 mid-boss fights. The random encounters have a chance to get a sneak attack and possibly wipe me out and the bosses can certainly get lucky and kill me as well. (Action order in the round is based on agility and job level but has a random component as well. It is very possible the boss will get 2 turns between actions from my healer which could be very bad news.)
I'm not opposed to the final dungeon being long, or to it being hard. I want the final boss to be tricky and to require building a good party for the task or leveling a bunch. I feel like I should die while I get the hang of the fight. But when I'm probably going to lose 5+ hours in the process? That's not cool. (If I die then I lose the 3 hours it will take me to get back to that point and probably I'll want to grind out a couple hours worth of levels before I do if I died for power level reasons.)
The last time I played Final Fantasy III, after buying it for the DS a few years ago, I actually didn't finish the game. I died in the final dungeon, lost a couple hours, and got fed up. I don't remember if I just took a break to play something else or what but I never did go back and finish up. Andrew bought the game on DS at the same time I did and I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to him. It's just so demoralizing to lose a couple hours worth of progress because the game simply doesn't let you prevent it from happening in any way except by being perfect and lucky in every single fight in the final dungeon.
I don't have a clue what the final boss is going to be like but I think my current party set-up is going to be pretty good for winning no matter what it ends up being. Viking, black belt, devout, ninja is working out pretty well. The black belt and ninja take way too much damage from melee hits and from spells but I've leveled enough that it should take three hits to kill them. The devout casts a full heal spell on the whole party every round and the viking taunts 80% of the time. Bosses so far have only ever cast one spell per round so the only way I can lose someone is if the taunt fails AND the timing works out poorly such that the boss goes twice between devout rounds AND he actually casts two spells AND he targets one of the squishies with his attack. Then I have to spend an arise spell on them which prevents the party from getting healed so things do get dangerous but I can probably survive. I'll probably get to find out tonight if I'm going to have won the game or if I'm going to be very bitter...
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Earth Crystal Jobs
It's go time! Three different airships later and I've finally reached the final crystal and unlocked the remaining jobs. It's time to pick what I expect to be my final party for the rest of the game. The earth crystal has 6 new jobs...
First of all, the black belt. In a sense this is the 'upgraded' monk job. It attacks barehanded like a monk. It has a useless special ability like a monk. (You can spend an entire turn charging up so you can do double damage on the next attack. Or two turns to do triple damage. Maybe useful on enemies that split but pretty much a non-factor for the most part.) On the plus side the black belt has way more strength, agility, and vitality compared to the monk. In fact it has the most vitality of any job in the game and is a must use if you want to max out your health. With a high job level and high melee proficiency I imagine these guys do pretty good damage. Part of me wants to turn my tank into one of these for a while just to build up maximum health.
Next, the magus. This is the ultimate black magic caster. I haven't purchased any black magic spells since the start of the game when I had some red mages. This job might be pretty good but it doesn't really fit in with what I've been doing so far.
Now a real choice: the devout. This is the upgraded white magic caster. The white mage can never cast level 8 spells and gets substantially fewer casts of the higher level spells. On the other hand the white mage gets significantly more casts of low level spells. And is already job level 58. And will gain job levels faster than the devout. If we look at the healing spell formula every 2 mind is worth an additional base healing of the spell and every 4 job levels is worth the same amount. At level 50 the devout will have 12 more mind than the white mage which is nowhere near enough to make up the job level difference. I'm pretty sure in the short term the white mage will actually be significantly better both in terms of total amount healed across all spells and in terms of throughput over a short period of time like a boss fight. On the other hand arise is a level 8 spell and it's awesome and devout only. And if I end up leveling enough that the white mage gets job level capped the devout will eventually pass her.
Next up, the summoner. This is the upgraded evoker and actually gets different affects from each of the summons. The evoker was random, the summoner is fixed. And better. Summoner is tempting to play around with for sure but I don't have any of the summon spells yet so he's going to have to sit on the bench for at least a while.
Sage is an interesting option. Take the magus, the devout, and the evoker and squish them together. You can't learn all the spells but you get to choose which spells you do want to have across all three schools. Their spell progression is pretty bad, unfortunately. The devout gets twice as many level 8 spell casts as the sage. The sage does actually get more level 1 spells though if I want more cure spells...
Last but definitely not least... Ninja! The ninja is simply awesome. He has a very useful special ability: throw. This lets you chuck old weapons for big damage. Eventually you can get shurikens which do even bigger damage. Even when you're not throwing weapons they have high agility and strength so they do a ton of auto-attack damage. They get to use some spicy weapons. They're pretty much guaranteed to go first each round. The only downside is they're rather squishy, especially against spells.
I think next time I play this game I want to try ignoring melee attacks for the most part and just use spells and cool abilities but this time through I've been running tank+healer+melee DPS and I don't see any real reason to stop now. Especially with the way melee proficiency works it really feels like I should keep on beating down at this point. My plan is to use a party of viking, black belt, devout, ninja and see how that treats me. I'm also going to try scumming for health by tracking when my viking is going to level up and switch him to a black belt for the bonus vitality. I'll get punished by the weakened debuff a bit by doing so but viking and black belt are similar enough that the debuff won't last very long. (5 fights total for the 2 switches I think, and it'll only get lower as I gain job levels.) This party will be worse in the short term but once I find a vendor for level 8 spells it should get better.
First of all, the black belt. In a sense this is the 'upgraded' monk job. It attacks barehanded like a monk. It has a useless special ability like a monk. (You can spend an entire turn charging up so you can do double damage on the next attack. Or two turns to do triple damage. Maybe useful on enemies that split but pretty much a non-factor for the most part.) On the plus side the black belt has way more strength, agility, and vitality compared to the monk. In fact it has the most vitality of any job in the game and is a must use if you want to max out your health. With a high job level and high melee proficiency I imagine these guys do pretty good damage. Part of me wants to turn my tank into one of these for a while just to build up maximum health.
Next, the magus. This is the ultimate black magic caster. I haven't purchased any black magic spells since the start of the game when I had some red mages. This job might be pretty good but it doesn't really fit in with what I've been doing so far.
Now a real choice: the devout. This is the upgraded white magic caster. The white mage can never cast level 8 spells and gets substantially fewer casts of the higher level spells. On the other hand the white mage gets significantly more casts of low level spells. And is already job level 58. And will gain job levels faster than the devout. If we look at the healing spell formula every 2 mind is worth an additional base healing of the spell and every 4 job levels is worth the same amount. At level 50 the devout will have 12 more mind than the white mage which is nowhere near enough to make up the job level difference. I'm pretty sure in the short term the white mage will actually be significantly better both in terms of total amount healed across all spells and in terms of throughput over a short period of time like a boss fight. On the other hand arise is a level 8 spell and it's awesome and devout only. And if I end up leveling enough that the white mage gets job level capped the devout will eventually pass her.
Next up, the summoner. This is the upgraded evoker and actually gets different affects from each of the summons. The evoker was random, the summoner is fixed. And better. Summoner is tempting to play around with for sure but I don't have any of the summon spells yet so he's going to have to sit on the bench for at least a while.
Sage is an interesting option. Take the magus, the devout, and the evoker and squish them together. You can't learn all the spells but you get to choose which spells you do want to have across all three schools. Their spell progression is pretty bad, unfortunately. The devout gets twice as many level 8 spell casts as the sage. The sage does actually get more level 1 spells though if I want more cure spells...
Last but definitely not least... Ninja! The ninja is simply awesome. He has a very useful special ability: throw. This lets you chuck old weapons for big damage. Eventually you can get shurikens which do even bigger damage. Even when you're not throwing weapons they have high agility and strength so they do a ton of auto-attack damage. They get to use some spicy weapons. They're pretty much guaranteed to go first each round. The only downside is they're rather squishy, especially against spells.
I think next time I play this game I want to try ignoring melee attacks for the most part and just use spells and cool abilities but this time through I've been running tank+healer+melee DPS and I don't see any real reason to stop now. Especially with the way melee proficiency works it really feels like I should keep on beating down at this point. My plan is to use a party of viking, black belt, devout, ninja and see how that treats me. I'm also going to try scumming for health by tracking when my viking is going to level up and switch him to a black belt for the bonus vitality. I'll get punished by the weakened debuff a bit by doing so but viking and black belt are similar enough that the debuff won't last very long. (5 fights total for the 2 switches I think, and it'll only get lower as I gain job levels.) This party will be worse in the short term but once I find a vendor for level 8 spells it should get better.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Water Crystal Jobs
The party of knight, knight, white mage, knight ended up being better and worse than expected. I definitely didn't have 6 quality swords to use and really only had 3 which meant one of my knights was awesome, one was ok, and one was pretty weak. In random encounters they were all fine but on bosses if they didn't have top swords they hardly did any damage to the boss. On the plus side just standing around and casting cure every round meant I simply couldn't lose either. Boss fights took forever but I wasn't in any real danger of losing. I did decide to job level grind before tackling the water crystal boss to get my guys from 6 swings a round to 8 swings per round. It turned out doing so also leveled up melee proficiency in one hand so they were swinging 9 times. (I bet they'd start swinging 10 times after just a couple more fights.) One thing I did notice is that having lower agility meant they went after the white mage pretty much always. And she still does more damage with her lightning staff than they did with auto attacks so often she'd kill the monsters before they could get their job level experience. Sigh.
At any rate the town after the water crystal doesn't sell any gear for knights at all so I really want to swap out at least 2 of my knights for other things. On the plus side I have 5 new options to consider!
First of all there's the viking. He's an interesting job and doesn't at all do what you'd think he does from the name. When I think of vikings I think of crazed killing machines on boats. Maybe my view of vikings are just different than reality though as I remember being extremely disappointed by the board game VIKINGS! since it had a lot of vikings doing non-combat related things. There was no raping or pillaging involved. But I digress... The viking job in this game is the true tank job. His special ability is provoke which forces one enemy to attack him in the next round and also lowers the enemy defense in the process. Unfortunately they decided to scale both of these abilities with job level so you really want to level a viking a whole lot to make his ability useful and it takes max job level to make it a guarantee. But having the ability to make bosses focus their attacks onto one target is insanely powerful. Unfortunately compared to the knights I have now he actually has worse vitality so while he may be a 'tank' he won't have as much health. He does have higher strength so he'd probably do more damage at equal job levels?
Next is the dragoon. Like Kain in Final Fantasy IV he has the jump ability as his special ability which causes the dragoon to disappear from the fight and then come back next turn to do a bunch of damage. Unfortunately the damage done is worse than just attacking twice would have been until you get the dragoon's job level up pretty high. Max it out and it does a ton of damage and it also does double damage to flying monsters. Beyond that he has less strength and vitality than a knight but more agility. And if you recall earlier when discussing the thief I said there was one item in the game that you needed a very high level thief to steal? It's the best weapon for the dragoon. Yeah, I didn't level a thief the whole way which pretty much excludes dragoon from being a top end game option for me this time around.
Then we have the dark knight. Like Cecil in the first part of the harder versions of Final Fantasy IV he has the souleater ability which is a massive AE attack which hurts all the enemies and the dark knight. The damage from this ability scaled pretty crazily with job level, current health, and weapon attack. It seems pretty great at wiping out random fights filled with dudes but I like using those fights to level up my job levels and my melee proficiencies... Like the dragoon he has more agility than my knights but less strength and vitality. I don't know that I want to use a dark knight the whole time so the fact that using his ability costs me melee proficiency in the long run really sucks. Also less max hp than just staying as a knight, so I think I'll be passing.
Next up is a new spellcaster job: evoker! This job gets to cast summon spells for cool and powerful effects. Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks here... For one, there is no place to buy summon spells that I can access right now! Switching to an evoker immediately is just kicking myself in the junk for fun and that doesn't actually sound like fun at all. Then like the geomancer you don't get to decide what the summon does, it picks from 2 options each time. 2 very different options one of which you probably don't want. It also has pathetically bad vitality. Yeah, there's pretty much no reason to want to switch to one of these guys.
Finally there's a unique job: bard. She has the special ability to sing a song with her equipped harp which does something cool to the party. Small defense buff, or attack buff, or damage, or an ae heal, or a damage taken debuff. All of which sounds kinda cool but they can't all be done right away since you can't get all the harps right away. As far as stats go they have bad strength and vitality so she probably does bad damage and has lower maximum health. I can definitely see bards being good with some setups (the AE heal combined with the dark knight's souleater seems pretty spicy) but that doesn't really fit in with the way I'm playing right now.
So, what am I going to do? Well, none of these jobs can take the place of my white mage yet so I'm keeping her around. I really want to ditch some knights for sword related reasons but dark knights also use swords so that doesn't help. Evokers and bards don't fit my party plan. I do like tanks and vikings use different weapons so I think I'll switch into one of those. I could switch into a dragoon for the short term but since I can't get their best weapon I'm not going to stay with them forever. I think I'm better off keeping the higher vitality knight around. As such I believe my party for now is going to be viking, knight, white mage, knight.
At any rate the town after the water crystal doesn't sell any gear for knights at all so I really want to swap out at least 2 of my knights for other things. On the plus side I have 5 new options to consider!
First of all there's the viking. He's an interesting job and doesn't at all do what you'd think he does from the name. When I think of vikings I think of crazed killing machines on boats. Maybe my view of vikings are just different than reality though as I remember being extremely disappointed by the board game VIKINGS! since it had a lot of vikings doing non-combat related things. There was no raping or pillaging involved. But I digress... The viking job in this game is the true tank job. His special ability is provoke which forces one enemy to attack him in the next round and also lowers the enemy defense in the process. Unfortunately they decided to scale both of these abilities with job level so you really want to level a viking a whole lot to make his ability useful and it takes max job level to make it a guarantee. But having the ability to make bosses focus their attacks onto one target is insanely powerful. Unfortunately compared to the knights I have now he actually has worse vitality so while he may be a 'tank' he won't have as much health. He does have higher strength so he'd probably do more damage at equal job levels?
Next is the dragoon. Like Kain in Final Fantasy IV he has the jump ability as his special ability which causes the dragoon to disappear from the fight and then come back next turn to do a bunch of damage. Unfortunately the damage done is worse than just attacking twice would have been until you get the dragoon's job level up pretty high. Max it out and it does a ton of damage and it also does double damage to flying monsters. Beyond that he has less strength and vitality than a knight but more agility. And if you recall earlier when discussing the thief I said there was one item in the game that you needed a very high level thief to steal? It's the best weapon for the dragoon. Yeah, I didn't level a thief the whole way which pretty much excludes dragoon from being a top end game option for me this time around.
Then we have the dark knight. Like Cecil in the first part of the harder versions of Final Fantasy IV he has the souleater ability which is a massive AE attack which hurts all the enemies and the dark knight. The damage from this ability scaled pretty crazily with job level, current health, and weapon attack. It seems pretty great at wiping out random fights filled with dudes but I like using those fights to level up my job levels and my melee proficiencies... Like the dragoon he has more agility than my knights but less strength and vitality. I don't know that I want to use a dark knight the whole time so the fact that using his ability costs me melee proficiency in the long run really sucks. Also less max hp than just staying as a knight, so I think I'll be passing.
Next up is a new spellcaster job: evoker! This job gets to cast summon spells for cool and powerful effects. Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks here... For one, there is no place to buy summon spells that I can access right now! Switching to an evoker immediately is just kicking myself in the junk for fun and that doesn't actually sound like fun at all. Then like the geomancer you don't get to decide what the summon does, it picks from 2 options each time. 2 very different options one of which you probably don't want. It also has pathetically bad vitality. Yeah, there's pretty much no reason to want to switch to one of these guys.
Finally there's a unique job: bard. She has the special ability to sing a song with her equipped harp which does something cool to the party. Small defense buff, or attack buff, or damage, or an ae heal, or a damage taken debuff. All of which sounds kinda cool but they can't all be done right away since you can't get all the harps right away. As far as stats go they have bad strength and vitality so she probably does bad damage and has lower maximum health. I can definitely see bards being good with some setups (the AE heal combined with the dark knight's souleater seems pretty spicy) but that doesn't really fit in with the way I'm playing right now.
So, what am I going to do? Well, none of these jobs can take the place of my white mage yet so I'm keeping her around. I really want to ditch some knights for sword related reasons but dark knights also use swords so that doesn't help. Evokers and bards don't fit my party plan. I do like tanks and vikings use different weapons so I think I'll switch into one of those. I could switch into a dragoon for the short term but since I can't get their best weapon I'm not going to stay with them forever. I think I'm better off keeping the higher vitality knight around. As such I believe my party for now is going to be viking, knight, white mage, knight.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Fire Crystal Jobs
Friday after work I cleared out the fire crystal dungeon and was rewarded with 4 new jobs. My job levels in my current jobs are in the 20-23 range so I'm going to be giving up an attack or two per hand and a couple damage per swing if I switch out so these new jobs better be pretty special to be worth making that leap. What are they?
First up, the ranger. Rangers are basically an auto-attacking job that uses a bow and arrow. They can wear pretty good armor and can stand in the back row so they take significantly less damage than my current damage dealing jobs. They have a special ability which does less damage than an attack unless you're at a pretty high job level so it's not really worth considering. As far as stats go they have less strength than either a monk or a red mage. They have the same agility and vitality as a monk and more than a red mage. They use a different damage formula entirely (and I think only level 1 melee proficiency hand instead of both) and actually consume arrows with each attack. I've always hated archer characters in Final Fantasy games that consumed arrows so even if I thought switching to a ranger was a good idea I probably wouldn't. As is they don't seem good enough anyway. Pass.
Next up, the knight. It turns out there isn't a paladin job in the game and the knight does most of the things you'd expect a paladin to do. They act a lot like Cecil does in Final Fantasy IV, actually. They can cast white magic spells but only at level 1 so they're pretty much just a cure battery from a spell point of view. Their defend action is modified to be based on job level instead of a flat 50%. It's actually worse than the base defend until job level 50! They have some sort of 'auto-cover' ability of weak allies. They can wear a lot of the good armor so they're pretty tough and can use all of the swords except the onion knight stuff. They have the same strength as a monk which is substantially more than a red mage at my current level. They have lower agility than both. They have higher vitality than both. Vitality determines hit point growth each time you level up and is the only real permanent result of being in a job so having high vitality is a big plus. I'm really considering switching at least one of my red mages into a knight and might do all 3 of my damage dealers if I have enough swords.
For laughs, we have the scholar. These guys are terrible. Ostensibly they can cast both black and white magic spells up to level 3 but their spell growth is really bad. The knight actually gets more spell casts at my level than the scholar does! They do have more strength and agility than my red mages so they might do more auto-attack damage but they have substantially less vitality so in the long run I'd be losing permanent max health by being a scholar. Scholars do have the special ability to peep an enemy like Cid in Final Fantasy IV. I already have that spell for my white mage so I don't care. Scholars also double the usage of any items they use, so if I was glitching the game to have a lot of combat spell items that could be useful... But I'm not cheating so that doesn't help all that much.
Finally we have the geomancer. These guys are weird. They're mediocre in combat but they have a special ability you use every time they get an action. They cast a random wacky spell based on the current environment. (A lot like Mog in Final Fantasy VI!) Each environment has its own list of abilities that can be chosen (with lots of overlap) and they can be pretty powerful. The damage done is based on job level so I think these guys can eventually do some pretty crazy damage. I remember last time I played the game I used one of these and was generally happy with that choice. Not being able to control specifically what attack is chosen can be annoying though. (Monsters that resist fire tend to be found in fire caves, for example. Fire caves tend to generate fire damage attacks.) They have lower vitality than my current characters so I would be losing max health by using one. They can't cast any magic at all so I lose my off-healing ability if I switch a red mage into a geomancer.
First up, the ranger. Rangers are basically an auto-attacking job that uses a bow and arrow. They can wear pretty good armor and can stand in the back row so they take significantly less damage than my current damage dealing jobs. They have a special ability which does less damage than an attack unless you're at a pretty high job level so it's not really worth considering. As far as stats go they have less strength than either a monk or a red mage. They have the same agility and vitality as a monk and more than a red mage. They use a different damage formula entirely (and I think only level 1 melee proficiency hand instead of both) and actually consume arrows with each attack. I've always hated archer characters in Final Fantasy games that consumed arrows so even if I thought switching to a ranger was a good idea I probably wouldn't. As is they don't seem good enough anyway. Pass.
Next up, the knight. It turns out there isn't a paladin job in the game and the knight does most of the things you'd expect a paladin to do. They act a lot like Cecil does in Final Fantasy IV, actually. They can cast white magic spells but only at level 1 so they're pretty much just a cure battery from a spell point of view. Their defend action is modified to be based on job level instead of a flat 50%. It's actually worse than the base defend until job level 50! They have some sort of 'auto-cover' ability of weak allies. They can wear a lot of the good armor so they're pretty tough and can use all of the swords except the onion knight stuff. They have the same strength as a monk which is substantially more than a red mage at my current level. They have lower agility than both. They have higher vitality than both. Vitality determines hit point growth each time you level up and is the only real permanent result of being in a job so having high vitality is a big plus. I'm really considering switching at least one of my red mages into a knight and might do all 3 of my damage dealers if I have enough swords.
For laughs, we have the scholar. These guys are terrible. Ostensibly they can cast both black and white magic spells up to level 3 but their spell growth is really bad. The knight actually gets more spell casts at my level than the scholar does! They do have more strength and agility than my red mages so they might do more auto-attack damage but they have substantially less vitality so in the long run I'd be losing permanent max health by being a scholar. Scholars do have the special ability to peep an enemy like Cid in Final Fantasy IV. I already have that spell for my white mage so I don't care. Scholars also double the usage of any items they use, so if I was glitching the game to have a lot of combat spell items that could be useful... But I'm not cheating so that doesn't help all that much.
Finally we have the geomancer. These guys are weird. They're mediocre in combat but they have a special ability you use every time they get an action. They cast a random wacky spell based on the current environment. (A lot like Mog in Final Fantasy VI!) Each environment has its own list of abilities that can be chosen (with lots of overlap) and they can be pretty powerful. The damage done is based on job level so I think these guys can eventually do some pretty crazy damage. I remember last time I played the game I used one of these and was generally happy with that choice. Not being able to control specifically what attack is chosen can be annoying though. (Monsters that resist fire tend to be found in fire caves, for example. Fire caves tend to generate fire damage attacks.) They have lower vitality than my current characters so I would be losing max health by using one. They can't cast any magic at all so I lose my off-healing ability if I switch a red mage into a geomancer.
Part of me wants to use a geomancer again like last time but part of me wants to be different and there are some real drawbacks to being a geomancer so I think I'm going to pass. None of the new jobs can cast cura so I'm going to keep my white mage around. I don't actually think I'm going to keep a red mage or a monk into the end game so accumulating more job levels on them isn't really an investment in the future. Getting more maximum health from the knight job seems like a good idea so I'm going to try swapping into a party of knight, knight, white mage, knight. The going will probably get a little harder in the short term as I lose those attacks from my old job levels but the extra healing from a 3rd off-healer should offset that a little. On the plus side I should be able to keep leveling all my melee proficiencies and if I have to grind a little to be able to move forward I'm ok with that.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Job Level
I keep mentioning how the game strongly encourages staying with the same job and punishes you for dabbling in lots of jobs. The punishment is pretty simple: you suffer a decrease to all stats and everything you do for a set number of fights each time you switch. The encouragement comes in the form of an increasing job level and all the things it impacts, which are:
damage = (1+A/7+J/14+(M-1)/7-W/6)*(K+S-V/2-D/2+J/11+M/9)*MIN(K/D, 2)*(80+H+A/10+J/10-E/20-V/6)/200*RANDBETWEEN(.5, .7)*MIN((A-E+105)/100, 1.1)
A = agility
J = job level
M = melee proficiency
W = weight of equipment
K = attack
S = strength
V = enemy vitality
D = enemy defense
H = weapon hit rate
E = enemy agility
V = weight of weapon
I love numbers and formulae and my eyes are glazing over just looking at that. And that's for the 'simple' case of one weapon! Using two weapons means doing something where you do that calculation for both weapons, add them up, and multiply by .6. And because that formula is just too simple there are also complications when using a bow, a harp, or bare hands. Yeah.
One thing that jumps out is that in the portion that calculates damage per swing 11 job levels are worth the same amount as one strength. So switching to a job with a better strength progression is definitely worth it from a damage per swing standpoint.
In the number of hits section 14 job levels is the same as 7 agility. I actually need a much better agility progression switch to make this worthwhile but it's very believable that it could happen.
Chance to hit? Agility and job level are equivalent. Chance to crit? Agility matters and job level doesn't seem to.
I also notice that melee proficiency is actually a bigger deal than job level in both number of swings and damage per swing. This is a number that just goes up as you attack. You have a different number for each hand which is a little weird and means you should either never use a shield or always use a shield. (Melee proficiency actually seems like a much better way of doing number of swings than the way FFI of FFII handled it.) It's unfortunately a completely hidden stat so I can't find out what it is. But on the plus side it doesn't really matter what it is... I can only make it bigger by attacking and I want to do that most of the time anyway! It does mean that my white mage is a much worse attacker than the rest of my team right now. So I should keep her in a caster role if possible.
- Number of swings when using the attack command.
- Crit chance.
- Damage done per swing.
- Damage done when casting black magic spells.
- Healing done when casting white magic spells.
- Damage dealt by summon spells.
- Attack power of monks and black belts when bare handed.
- Special abilities of some jobs get better. (Thieves steal different things, warriors do slightly more damage and take slightly more damage, etc...)
- At max level you unlock a cool item assuming you've done the Mognet stuff.
damage = (1+A/7+J/14+(M-1)/7-W/6)*(K+S-V/2-D/2+J/11+M/9)*MIN(K/D, 2)*(80+H+A/10+J/10-E/20-V/6)/200*RANDBETWEEN(.5, .7)*MIN((A-E+105)/100, 1.1)
A = agility
J = job level
M = melee proficiency
W = weight of equipment
K = attack
S = strength
V = enemy vitality
D = enemy defense
H = weapon hit rate
E = enemy agility
V = weight of weapon
I love numbers and formulae and my eyes are glazing over just looking at that. And that's for the 'simple' case of one weapon! Using two weapons means doing something where you do that calculation for both weapons, add them up, and multiply by .6. And because that formula is just too simple there are also complications when using a bow, a harp, or bare hands. Yeah.
One thing that jumps out is that in the portion that calculates damage per swing 11 job levels are worth the same amount as one strength. So switching to a job with a better strength progression is definitely worth it from a damage per swing standpoint.
In the number of hits section 14 job levels is the same as 7 agility. I actually need a much better agility progression switch to make this worthwhile but it's very believable that it could happen.
Chance to hit? Agility and job level are equivalent. Chance to crit? Agility matters and job level doesn't seem to.
I also notice that melee proficiency is actually a bigger deal than job level in both number of swings and damage per swing. This is a number that just goes up as you attack. You have a different number for each hand which is a little weird and means you should either never use a shield or always use a shield. (Melee proficiency actually seems like a much better way of doing number of swings than the way FFI of FFII handled it.) It's unfortunately a completely hidden stat so I can't find out what it is. But on the plus side it doesn't really matter what it is... I can only make it bigger by attacking and I want to do that most of the time anyway! It does mean that my white mage is a much worse attacker than the rest of my team right now. So I should keep her in a caster role if possible.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Mognet
One of the things Square added in the remake of the game is a mail service called Mognet where they retconned moogles into the game and had them deliver letters between your party and some NPCs. On its own this does nothing at all. Provides some random story background maybe. It also lets you send messages to other people who own the game via Nintendo's terrible wi-fi communication service. Send 7 such messages and you actually unlock a whole bunch of quests to get unique stuff!
The final job in the game can only be obtained via these quests. It is in some senses the worst job in the game so it doesn't matter at all that you can't get it without using the wireless communication stuff. In other senses it is the absolute best job in the game. It has a very interesting stat progression where it's absolutely terrible until character level 95 or so where it skyrockets into being the best.
The best weapon in the game can only be obtained via these quests. I may not want to be an onion knight but I can't imagine not wanting the best weapon in the game!
Every job has a good to awesome job specific item which can only be obtained via these quests. You also need to have hit job level 99 in a job to get the item. A monk would take 678 actions to hit max job level which seems like an awful lot just to get a set of arm equipment with +20 strength.
For the most part this stuff seems extraneous. I kinda want to get some of it just to say I have it (I don't really have a schtick yet for this game... Maybe it should be to build a party of maxed out onion knights!) I would like to get an ultimate weapon though.
Unfortunately as it stands right now I can't access the Nintendo Wi-Fi network. It turns out they set it up so the DS could only connect via a bad wireless security protocol (WEP?) and my router gets very angry when I try to enable it. As such I've been unable to get my own friend code to even try to start the process of sending out 7 mails. Part of me is frustrated that there's stuff I simply can't do for technical reasons but maybe it's ok that I just ignore this junk and play the game normally. Of course I am going to try to see if Andrew or Andrew's neighbour has an outdated security protocol this weekend... And maybe I'll even hook up my own router and see if I can't make it work.
The final job in the game can only be obtained via these quests. It is in some senses the worst job in the game so it doesn't matter at all that you can't get it without using the wireless communication stuff. In other senses it is the absolute best job in the game. It has a very interesting stat progression where it's absolutely terrible until character level 95 or so where it skyrockets into being the best.
The best weapon in the game can only be obtained via these quests. I may not want to be an onion knight but I can't imagine not wanting the best weapon in the game!
Every job has a good to awesome job specific item which can only be obtained via these quests. You also need to have hit job level 99 in a job to get the item. A monk would take 678 actions to hit max job level which seems like an awful lot just to get a set of arm equipment with +20 strength.
For the most part this stuff seems extraneous. I kinda want to get some of it just to say I have it (I don't really have a schtick yet for this game... Maybe it should be to build a party of maxed out onion knights!) I would like to get an ultimate weapon though.
Unfortunately as it stands right now I can't access the Nintendo Wi-Fi network. It turns out they set it up so the DS could only connect via a bad wireless security protocol (WEP?) and my router gets very angry when I try to enable it. As such I've been unable to get my own friend code to even try to start the process of sending out 7 mails. Part of me is frustrated that there's stuff I simply can't do for technical reasons but maybe it's ok that I just ignore this junk and play the game normally. Of course I am going to try to see if Andrew or Andrew's neighbour has an outdated security protocol this weekend... And maybe I'll even hook up my own router and see if I can't make it work.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Wind Crystal Jobs
I've put a few hours into the game over the last couple days and have obtained the first set of jobs. (You start the game with only the 'freelancer' job which is like a bad red mage. It can use all the early gear and cast level 1 white and black magic spells.) I died a few times in the process as I ended up skipping a room with the only early copy of the cure spell which made surviving in the early couple fights rough. I had to grind up a couple levels in order to press on without it but that's pretty reasonable I think. At least I was getting better by fighting!
The wind crystal granted 6 jobs which should be very familiar to anyone who played the initial Final Fantasy. They are warrior, monk, thief, white mage, black mage, and red mage. These jobs are very similar to the classes from FFI but the balance is shifted pretty drastically in comparison. Warriors scaled in a ludicrous fashion in that game, thieves were truly terrible, and red mages couldn't even cast all of the spells that white and black mages could. Quite a few things have changed here...
Maybe I should have a warrior to use the viking axe I found but since it hurts to switch jobs and there's no way I'm going to be a warrior for the whole game (pretty sure there are paladins and ninjas to come) it's just going to get to sit in my inventory and rot.
The wind crystal granted 6 jobs which should be very familiar to anyone who played the initial Final Fantasy. They are warrior, monk, thief, white mage, black mage, and red mage. These jobs are very similar to the classes from FFI but the balance is shifted pretty drastically in comparison. Warriors scaled in a ludicrous fashion in that game, thieves were truly terrible, and red mages couldn't even cast all of the spells that white and black mages could. Quite a few things have changed here...
- You're not stuck in a given job for the whole game. Even if one of the jobs scaled a lot better in the end game it wouldn't matter since you're probably not going to be that job anymore.
- Red mages can cast all of the spells that the other mages can cast though they get to cast them less frequently. They cast the spells at the same power level as the other mages.
- I got an item already which can be used to cast fire which is the best action any of my characters can take.
- Warriors actually have the strictly worst stats at level 10, though not by all that much.
- I've found one item thus far that a warrior could use that a red mage couldn't.
- Monks have the highest strength, thieves have the highest agility, all jobs have the same vitality.
- Warriors get a unique ability which isn't terribly useful unless you hit max job level.
- Monks get a unique ability which isn't terribly useful ever.
- Thieves get a unique ability which lets you steal stuff. What you can steal is based on job level and there are very few items worth stealing.
Maybe I should have a warrior to use the viking axe I found but since it hurts to switch jobs and there's no way I'm going to be a warrior for the whole game (pretty sure there are paladins and ninjas to come) it's just going to get to sit in my inventory and rot.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Final Fantasy III
Final Fantasy III is the final installment of the main series published for the original Famicom. It didn't make it out of Japan in its original form and actually took more than 16 years before it was officially released in English with a DS remake. I played a fan translated version of the original Japanese ROM back in 2003 when I did my first Final Fantasy marathon but I have since acquired the DS version which is what I'll be playing this time around.
Final Fantasy III was the first game to use the job system which has become a sporadic feature in the series. (FFIII, FFV, FFX-2, FFXI, FFXIII, FFXIV, FFTactics, FFTacticsAdvance, FFTacticsA2...) For those who may not know, in a job system each of your characters gets to pick a job and earns both character level experience and job experience towards the chosen job. If you chose white mage then you'll get better at casting healing spells. If you chose fighter you'll get better at doing damage. The difference between a job system and between a game like Final Fantasy I where you got to pick a class at the start of the game is that you can switch jobs at any time in a job system. Chose a bad party at the start of the game? That's ok, you can just switch people around! Run into a dungeon filled with elementals and wish you could cast more damage spells? Switch everyone to a black mage! Find a twinky bow in a treasure chest? Switch someone to a ranger! They tend to keep some of their power from their character level and lose some from their job level but they can quickly build up points in the new job. As the game progresses you unlock new jobs which tend to be more powerful so there's an incentive to swap things up as time goes on both for variety and for power.
Personally I think job systems are awesome. They've evolved into systems that provides a lot of interesting decisions. There are advantages to specializing in one job. There are advantages to branching out into a bunch of different jobs. You can combine features of different jobs together to make a character do what you want. The game can throw fights at you which are particularly suited for one job or another which enables you to use smarts to beat fights instead of just throwing more levels at a problem.
Unfortunately since FFIII was the first to include a job system it isn't quite as awesome as I'd like. They revamped it a little between the original and the DS remake but it still has some flaws. Instead of encouraging you to switch jobs it has a system in place that discourages switching. (All your stats get lowered for a number of fights after making the switch depending on how similar the two jobs were to each other.) There's no way to carry any skills or power over from a previous job so there's no 'build your own class' thing going on. The damage formulae heavily incentivize sticking with one job. It is still a fun system, don't get me wrong, and it had to exist in order for them to iterate on it to get to the even better systems in future games. I'm really looking forward to playing it a bunch. And as an added bonus I can play it on the subway and bus!
Final Fantasy III was the first game to use the job system which has become a sporadic feature in the series. (FFIII, FFV, FFX-2, FFXI, FFXIII, FFXIV, FFTactics, FFTacticsAdvance, FFTacticsA2...) For those who may not know, in a job system each of your characters gets to pick a job and earns both character level experience and job experience towards the chosen job. If you chose white mage then you'll get better at casting healing spells. If you chose fighter you'll get better at doing damage. The difference between a job system and between a game like Final Fantasy I where you got to pick a class at the start of the game is that you can switch jobs at any time in a job system. Chose a bad party at the start of the game? That's ok, you can just switch people around! Run into a dungeon filled with elementals and wish you could cast more damage spells? Switch everyone to a black mage! Find a twinky bow in a treasure chest? Switch someone to a ranger! They tend to keep some of their power from their character level and lose some from their job level but they can quickly build up points in the new job. As the game progresses you unlock new jobs which tend to be more powerful so there's an incentive to swap things up as time goes on both for variety and for power.
Personally I think job systems are awesome. They've evolved into systems that provides a lot of interesting decisions. There are advantages to specializing in one job. There are advantages to branching out into a bunch of different jobs. You can combine features of different jobs together to make a character do what you want. The game can throw fights at you which are particularly suited for one job or another which enables you to use smarts to beat fights instead of just throwing more levels at a problem.
Unfortunately since FFIII was the first to include a job system it isn't quite as awesome as I'd like. They revamped it a little between the original and the DS remake but it still has some flaws. Instead of encouraging you to switch jobs it has a system in place that discourages switching. (All your stats get lowered for a number of fights after making the switch depending on how similar the two jobs were to each other.) There's no way to carry any skills or power over from a previous job so there's no 'build your own class' thing going on. The damage formulae heavily incentivize sticking with one job. It is still a fun system, don't get me wrong, and it had to exist in order for them to iterate on it to get to the even better systems in future games. I'm really looking forward to playing it a bunch. And as an added bonus I can play it on the subway and bus!
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